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Admittedly, Miles had thought that it was Mr. von Karma, in his fevered state. The three-pronged walk, the tap of the cane, he had a very distinct canter, of course. On a better day, perhaps, Miles would have ears for the distinctions that defined it as decidedly not that of the manor’s patriarch—tilting footsteps, shorter pace, little noises, close together. Today, those nuances were lost—drowned somewhere in the sea of muck that sloshed around his head, blunting the sharpness of his ears.
The truth reveals itself when that sound nears his door, when a knock does not follow it. The good prosecutor’s knock was just as sturdy and spotless as the man himself, two succinct syllables in perfect rhythm. He rarely entered, mostly talked through the door—a kindness to the ever-reclusive Miles, who really just preferred to listen. Odd as it was, he liked how curt and professional Mr. von Karma acted, and how he didn’t shed all those tendencies when he stepped beyond the courthouse doors.
Today, though, there is no knock. And—Miles is remembering this only as little Franziska is pushing his door open—there is also no Mr. von Karma, as it’s nearly noon and he’s at trial. In the haze of illness, Miles’ logic center seems to have rusted itself to a halt, sending all its maintenance staff to whatever part of his personal biology keeps this uncomfortable fever of his climbing.
Despite that, though, he’s planning to keep to some of the proper bits of routine, at least—namely, not acknowledging Franziska’s intrusion. In the mornings, this is how she always woke him up—barging into his personal bedroom, loudly ordering him to get out of bed and stop acting so foolish, occasionally resorting to physical violence, most often of all shoving him on the floor. In the evenings and afternoons, it was much of the same—she’d stroll in, nose pointed high, rambling in Denglish about whatever thing was annoying her that day before plopping down onto Miles’ bed or at his desk chair. His eyes would remain locked there on whatever it was he was reading, and she would pull out a book of her own, and the two of them would just exist like that, as they had since he got there.
There his eyes stay, then, on the rare tome of nonfiction he’d picked out for his sickbed. Literature like this didn’t often interest the young Miles, but something about being ill made him almost reluctant to pick up a textbook and study, as though his body was rejecting it the same way it was the virus. Prickling at the idea of it, insisting that working through illness was not something people are supposed to do.
Franziska’s unnervingly quiet. Her grievances and ramblings and ineloquent English don’t come. Miles doesn’t really want to exert the nonexistent energy to turn his aching neck, take in her expression, make any foolish attempts to start the conversation. He’s a dreadful conversationalist, something she and her father know, which is why they so often lead. Realizing he’s not even sure how to start a conversation, Miles runs through a list of potential greetings in his head, selects one that feels slightly less awkward than he tends to feel when speaking, and turns to address—
Franziska is dressed as a plague doctor.
Ok.
That’s a good enough topic for conversation, Miles thinks. If only he could figure out how to even phrase it.
“What are you wearing?” is a little rhetorical. He can see what she’s wearing. “Why are you wearing that?” makes a bit more sense. As he’s mulling it over he’s able to really, properly take in the finer details of her ensemble—she’s got one of her long winter dresses on, same as ever, but Franziska was such a fan of greys and blacks that it hardly looks out of place with the rest of her. No plague doctor would look right without their long, sturdy staff, or in this case, a walking cane that was definitely stolen from her father’s personal collection. In her other arm, Franziska’s carrying a stuffed rabbit, with an identical, long-beaked mask made of scrunch-sculpture tin foil that she most certainly pilfered from the kitchens.
Most of the outfit makes sense, absurd as it is. Primarily, in that Miles can very easily discern how she threw 99.9% of it together. It’s easy to picture little, ever-moving Franziska—running through the mansion halls, grabbing each piece of the getup one by one. All but the most obvious, and so that is where Miles’ opening statement finally manages to find its legs.
“Where,” he rasps out, and points a finger at her incredibly real-looking mask, “did you get that?”
From behind its shelter and through his stuffy ears, he can barely hear her voice. “Closet.”
“Who’s closet?!”
“What matter of it, Miles Edgeworth?” She lifts her (Mr. von Karma’s) cane from its place on the ground, pointing its handle toward Miles’ nose. “For every life problem, von Karma finds her way.”
“Okay,” Miles says, and it might as well be his catchphrase, since meeting this wild girl and her even wilder whims. Failing on his first question, then, he opts for his second, “Why are you dressed like that?”
“Look into the mirror before you say foolish questions.” Franziska stabs the cane down hard against the velvet rug, the same way her father always did when he was feeling particularly irate. “I am here to heal you, little brother.”
“Heal me?”
“Yes!” Franziska exclaims, intent to project behind the mask. “Papa says you are indisposed. Though I did not understand at first, I can now see what he means.”
Miles blinks his aching eyes. “Have you never gotten sick before?”
“A von Karma’s immunity is perfect!” says Franziska, and she’s definitely lying. “I don’t worry such trifling matters. But, that does not mean I do not know them. So, I shall nurse you back to health.”
Okay.
“Okay,” Miles says, his whole body feeling leaden with resignation and fever. Congestion hammers itself in behind his eyes. The natural tone of his voice adds a silent whatever to the end of that statement, but the lack of enthusiasm Miles has for life in general has never stopped Franziska in the past. Really, it was like kindling to her ever-burning fire, as though she had to bring twice as much energy to compensate for his lack of it.
“You may thank me later,” says Franziska. “Give your arm to me.”
“What? Why?”
“Examination,” Franziska insists. “I have to determine your problem.”
“My problem is I’ve got a cold,” says Miles as he lazily holds out the arm closest to her, “which is pretty easy to solve with rest and fluids.”
“Incorrect again, little brother.” Franziska holds the appendage in her palm, poking idly at the barely-there muscle, the dead eyes of her mask somehow looking inquisitive. “I’ve known since the day you first came here. Your... um... augh, how do you call it?—your… pieces aren’t right.”
“My pieces?”
“I don’t know it in English!” She pokes him harder, causing a shut-eyed wince. “Körpersaft. Your innards. Blood, and things.”
“Are you trying to say humours?” He snatches his arm away, looking at her skeptically, more than a bit fearful of where this is going.
“Yes! Your humours!” Franziska seems unbothered by the sudden change in tone. “It is no wonder you’ve fallen ill, little brother. You are positively teeming with black bile.”
“I—”
“Do not try and argue!” she demands. “You have every classic sign. You are forlorn and sad-looking. Like a little black raincloud who floats along the wind.”
“That’s just how my face looks.”
“Your face is too sad.”
“Maybe your face isn’t sad enough.”
“My face is perfect, my humours too,” proclaims Franziska as she’s digging around in her bag. “Which is why I am perfectly qualified to re-orient yours.”
Lackadaisical, Miles stifles a wheezy cough into the back of his hand, promptly turns his eyes back onto his book, pays no mind to the strange little creature and her wildly frivolous plans.
“I don’t think you have a medical license.”
“I have books.”
“Oh yeah?” He flips a page on his own. “What have the books told you?”
“You’re full of black goop,” he hears her say at his flank, “and I shall get it out.”
“Oh, shall you, now.”
“You know, I hear of the leeches that wriggle in the creek down the road.” The smile in her voice makes Miles shudder, ten times more vigorously than the fever ever could. “This morning as I was gathering supplies, I thought how of easy. To fetch one of the large canning jars from the cellar. To grab a whole tangle of them out…”
She’s halfway through the sentence when Miles realizes he is mentally scoping out the exits in his head. Door, window, estimated time of kicking off his blankets, et cetera. He’s on the first floor, if he has to make a break for the window it won’t be too tedious. The words on the page in front of him are read, but don’t process into anything tangible in his head.
“Unfortunately,” Franziska says, “my chore boy is commissioned out, and I will not dirty my hands.”
“What a travesty.” Miles turns another page, feeling every muscle in his body loosen. “You’ll have to find some other way to bleed me dry, it seems.”
The second he hears himself speak the sentence, he wonders if he should have. It’s too late to worry about that, now, but he gets the sense that Franziska is grinning devilishly beneath the mask.
“A von Karma is always prepared, little brother.”
Finally, then, she removes the mask. Miles fights the urge to take a closer look, gauge just how committed she is to this medieval character she’s playing—are there herbs in the beak? Is she accounting for the dreadful miasma? Clearly not, bare-faced as she is now, the brightness in her expression almost lording itself over Miles’ convalescent doldrums.
She sticks the mask’s tie-back around her arm, hanging it there so she’s free to brandish what had previously dwelt in the depths of her bookbag. Currently, it’s actually a medical bag, Miles can surmise from the badly-drawn caduceus symbol she’s scribbled on notebook paper and taped over the blue cornflowers that normally decorate its outsides.
Whatever it’s supposed to be, Franziska’s holding a proper handful of her miraculous panacea, primed to cure Miles and all that ails him, a glorious remedy from the angels on high that looks an awful lot like…
A plastic straw.
Specifically, it is what’s colloquially known as a silly straw. Bright green, crisscrossing translucent loops that layer over each other, an absolutely juvenile object that Miles, quite frankly, has no idea where Franziska acquired. Now that he’s really thinking about it, somehow the plague mask makes a lot more sense than the silly straw.
“Give to me your arm again.”
“Why?”
“So I can fix you.”
“How is that going to fix me?”
“It is a substitute, as said. Do keep up, Miles.” Franziska sticks the thing in between her teeth, talking around it… rather impressively. “I’ll siphon the distemper right out of you.”
“I’m not—”
She’s not taking no for an answer, of course—the second it becomes apparent that no, Miles will not be offering her a vein to place the world’s most minuscule hickey on, Franziska lunges. She somehow clambers up atop Miles’ sickbed at the precise instant he speaks the words, and then he is weakly beating her back with the strength of an ailing victorian child. On a good day, Miles could hope to take her, but today his defenses are utterly shattered in far more ways than just the one.
“You are being a very uncooperative patient, Miles Edgeworth!”
“That’s because your—” he dodges her attempt to claw at his collar, “—bedside manner leaves much to be desired!”
“My bedside manner is perfect—” she pins his leg down, “—as are my treatment!”
“You’re not curing my cold with a silly straw!”
“Just try and stop me!”
That he does. Acting like a headwind to her stalwart proclamations, Miles finds the fates acting in his favour as he manages to smack the thing out of her little hand. Franziska needs a moment to even register that it’s happened—looking wide-eyed to her still-curled fingers, then to the far corner of the room, then to Miles, before her teeth are bared and her eyes narrow in barely-contained fury.
“You think you have won just because you dispatch but one of my remedies?” Franziska says, and Miles wants to respond walk over there and get it, but does not.
“I am a von Karma! And a von Karma always has a plan for back-ups!”
Her bag, which Miles was worried she might choke herself out on initially, had fallen from around her shoulder in the struggle. It was now splayed out at the midpoint of his bed, contents just barely peeking out of the top of it. With her weight still firmly pressing down his skinny knee, Franziska contorts herself across the divide to grab at it, yank the handle closer toward the two of them. Within its depths, Miles can hear what sounds like coins jangling around, and the sight of something sharp-looking and silvery sees him re-visiting his exit strategy, now accounting for shoving a 7-year-old girl off himself before he runs for his life.
“Franziska,” Miles says, trying to remain even-toned. “You are too young to play with knives.”
“Knives. So dramatic.” She rolls her eyes, and pulls one of the pristine, metallic utensils from her bag. “Or has the fever baked you so thoroughly that you’ve forgotten how a fork is?”
Oh thank god.
“There are certain texts to imply a good prick or three from a hot poker has a healing quality…”
Oh god no.
“The kitchen staff would not allow me to the stove without Papa’s permission, but it shall take me far less time to simply place it in the microwave and—”
“No!” She’s shuffling off the bed’s edge to skitter away and do just that when Miles grabs her dress and tugs her back, coughing all the way through the tear in his throat. An acrid glare is shot in his direction, as if to say how dare you put your hands on me, but for whatever reason, she does not make another attempt to leave.
“What, you cannot bear even a second away from me?” Ah. “Such a clingy little brother, you are.”
“Y-Yes, that’s exactly it.” And I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of cauterizing open wounds, anyways…
“Fine, fine.” Franziska leans back, crosses her arms, rolls her eyes in half-performative exasperation. “Well, I’ve got just one other thing here…”
From the bag, she produces… a riding crop. It looks a little bit oversized in her small, skinny hands, clearly having lain diagonally in the satchel’s depths to have even fit to begin with. Franziska twists it around in front of her face, clearly unsure of how to use it but far too proud to admit to that fact.
The question, of course, begs itself once more. “Where did you get that?”
“Well, I’ve always had it,” says Franziska, though it’s clear she hasn’t used it much. “Papa said it calmed me down as a baby.”
“He…” Miles feels his shoulders settle, albeit uncomfortably where the illness knocks them askew in their sockets. “What?”
“A von Karma is born to speak, and speak loudly,” elaborates Franziska, “but my wailing was always, and so Papa took to handing me various objects he had lying around, to soothe me. He says the riding crop was the only one that made me stop crying.”
What a strange little girl she was, but Miles already knew that.
“I see.” His voice gives just barely, and he holds the pressing urge to cough more behind his lips. “So, what? You brought it to calm me down, too?”
“What? Oh, no. You are very wrong, brother.”
Suddenly confident, then—and grinning far too wickedly, Franziska angles the long, black object beneath her chin, glowing behind its cover.
“In times of bad plague, the sick would seek atonement from being higher, believing their illness to be divine punishment,” Franziska explains. She slaps the thing down hard on one hand, tries to hide the way her eyes glitter the second the sound hits her ears.
“...one form, of course, was public and brutal self-flagellation.”
There’s a beat of silence for the words to register in the thick, heat-baked sludge that churns and roars inside Miles’ skull.
And then, of course, he dives for the door.
Discarding his now-irrelevant book, fighting every addled muscle in his body, untangling himself from the warmth of the covers—odds against him, Miles makes it a generous few feet before Franziska’s tackling him again, dragging the both of them down. He is going to have words the second her father comes home, that is if he survives her unorthodox attempts at treating him. Pinned on the floor, with all his bedsheets in disarray around him, all Miles can really do is splay his palm out on Franziska’s face, hold his arm straight as an iron rod, and take solace in the fact that her own little arms are too short to actually get a hit on him. Hacking like a choked beast as he does so, of course.
“Miles Edgeworth!” she shouts as she’s struggling. “You cannot resist my whims forever!”
“You wanna bet on that, Franziska?”
She growls. The growl crescendos, turning into a furious shriek, and then she’s just waving her arm again, nothing in the silence that remains but the errant swish-swash of the riding crop whistling through the air. Franziska, it seems, hears it too—a particularly loud whirr of leather catches her ear, and suddenly her mission to flog Miles falls away into the background of her mind. Her arms begin to slow, violent swings growing lazier… and by the time Miles lowers her down, she’s barely fighting at all.
“You’ll…” she slurs out half-heartedly, “...wirst dich mir nicht wider… setz…”
There on the carpet, the scene looks more than a bit absurd. Miles on his back, tired-eyed and pale-faced as he stares at the too-high ceiling and contemplates his life choices. Child prodigy Franziska von Karma, so transfixed by the sound of what is ostensibly a weapon that she is involuntarily lulling herself to sleep as she swings it over and over, methodically. Her whole weight on top of him as her limbs begin to jelly, as the sound of that riding crop peters out and, slowly but surely, her steady breathing takes its place.
Ridiculous. She was so adept at putting on those airs of a proper lady, Miles often found himself forgetting—even when she was attacking him—that Franziska was a small child.
His eyes pull themselves away from the ceiling, staring off to the side, into the foggy tin-foil gaze of Franziska’s stuffed rabbit. It stares back at him, dutifully keeping watch while the doctor is out.
Extricating himself would most certainly wake Franziska back up. As much as the floor is not ideal for sleeping, he… is really enjoying the silence of the room, right about now. And, as much as he will never say so out loud… the fever had seen him chilled and shivering, in a way that no blanket could fix. To have another person close, though, the warmth of her seems to chase the cold away entirely.
Miles swallows, a horrible tenderness screaming in his windpipe as he does. His head hurts. His eyelids feel heavy and sore on his face, begging to be shut.
Careful in his movements, intentional and slow… he reaches out as far as he can, index and middle finger just barely scooping at the soft fur of Franziska’s dedicated medical assistant. Like some sort of broken, sideways claw machine, then, Miles drags the thing closer to the both of them, until it is resting right there up against Franziska’s now-limp fingers. Some part of her still teetering there in the realm of consciousness, Miles watches with some small form of fondness as her digits twitch and aimlessly pull it inward. In her other hand, even in sleep, she clutches the riding crop just the same.
The blanket is close enough to be less of an ordeal. Regardless of the ridiculous nature of all of this, Miles may as well commit—he grabs onto the edge of it and draws it around the two of them, adding one more layer of absurdity to their pile of complete nonsense.
For some reason, this amount of weight and heat and silence is perfect. The white of the overcast turns golden outside his window as the clouds shift and the sun dips, and Miles can no longer resist the pull of sleep as it takes him.
The house is too quiet when Manfred von Karma arrives that evening. There is no pattering of small feet that rush to meet him, no slog of dragging steps behind them. The latter is more or less to be expected—Edgeworth was rather out of commission the last he checked—but Franziska’s absence is unaccounted for, certainly a curious departure from routine.
Dinner should be ready within the next hour, and it’s for this reason that he makes the decision to hang his coat, slip out of his boots, walk the halls for any errant signs of life. Pretending like it’s a form of reconnaissance is a formality, really—the God of Prosecutors did not earn that weighty title without a razorsharp mind to back it up. Through the dim lighting of the sunset as it filters in through the long, narrow windows, his feet carry themselves through the massive house, around each twisting corridor, to the young Miles Edgeworth’s room.
Of course, he is expecting to see Edgeworth there. Though the circumstances of their meeting are wrought with misfortune, Manfred cannot deny he is a good child, well-behaved to a fault. Franziska, far less so, which is why he’s expecting to find her there as well—scratching at her composition book at the older boy’s desk, prattling stories at his bedside, doing whatever she desires, as a von Karma should. He is expecting this. He is expecting both of them.
What he is not expecting is how he finds them—in a pile on the floor, one atop the other. The (oddly thin, on personal request) downy comforter from Edgeworth’s bed, half-slipping off Franziska. She’s lifted slowly—up, then down—by the steady crawl of the older boy’s breathing. No longer the wheezing thing it was this morning, far more rhythmic and deep.
With the wild abundance of miscellaneous nonsense items scattered about, and the ragdolled state of them laying there, the towering God of Prosecutors almost feels as though he’s walked out of one crime scene and right onto another. The children, at least, can pick up after themselves—whenever it is they choose to untangle themselves from one another, greet the waking world once more.
Dinner will be on the table within the next hour. The impulse, then, is to expedite this process—bend down to jostle them awake, so they have ample time to clean up the mess they’ve (Franziska’s) made. Manfred is shifting his cane beneath one arm, bending creaking knees, puzzling out how best to rouse them most efficiently.
Up close, though, the sight crystallizes twice as saturated. The way that Edgeworth curls an arm up and over Franziska, fingers limp on the small of her back. The way Franziska, too, clings to his sleepshirt—far more fiercely, like letting go will end them both. Despite the telling signs of mischief all around them, the pallor of the young boy’s face seems to have faded, and those everlasting dark circles beneath his eyes, well… perhaps it’s a trick of the light, but they look far less like bruises, too.
Hm. Well. Dinner does not always have to be had at the table. There’s ample staff tonight, more than enough to deliver food to the rooms. And there’s precedent, too—oftentimes the kids were too wrapped up in their studies to make it down to eat, ergo…
Still there on bent knees, Manfred lets his hand wander to the fallen blanket, instead. With the same meticulous intent he carries in all else, he pulls it back over the both of them, sheltering them from the autumn chill that trickles through the old, tired house.